French Renaissance

by Jeremy Whittle

  Caritoux should have been a bigger star than he was, but he raced in the shadow of Hinault, Fignon, Bernard, Madiot and the others, even though on the Ventoux, at least, he often had the better of them all. He first tackled the Ventoux, riding as far as Chalet Reynard, in 1971, when he was 11. ‘I was a schoolboy from Flassan, riding an eight speed,’ he remembers. ‘My mum and dad drove behind me, and I only had to put my foot down once.’

  His 1982 Tour de Vaucluse win, on the roads he’d ridden as a boy, was snatched from under the nose of future Tour de France champion Fignon, in the decisive time-trial stage from Bédoin to Chalet Reynard. It was a startling performance. Also relegated by almost two minutes in the time trial was Swiss climber Urs Zimmermann, who went on to finish third overall in the 1986 Tour de France.

  Fignon, beaten by a little-known French amateur from the CC Carpentras club, was enraged. ‘He accused me of being paced by a motorbike – we barely spoke to each other again,’ Caritoux remembers. As it turned out Caritoux had the last laugh. A year later, having turned professional, he rubbed the Parisian’s nose in it once again, beating him on the Ventoux by an almost identical margin.

  Now, Caritoux lives a simple life. Since he retired from racing, he has done some corporate work – driving guest cars for Tour promoters ASO and telecoms sponsor Orange, or guiding tourists over the Ventoux – but he’s happiest tending to his vines, producing table grapes. He was working in the vineyard in the spring of 1984, a second-year professional on a break between races, when a phone call came that should have changed his life. ‘It was May, and I didn’t have any races lined up. I was working in the vines, at the foot of Ventoux, when my grandmother called me in. “It’s Monsieur de Gribaldy!” she said.’

  ‘De Gri’ – or ‘le Vicomte’ – was the boss of Caritoux’s Skil team. Jean de Gribaldy had an instinctive eye for talent. He’d already signed a rough-and-ready Sean Kelly, after turning up, unannounced, at his parents’ farm in Ireland with a contract in his hand. Kelly was le Vicomte’s star rider, Caritoux a useful young apprentice.

  ‘De Gri told me to get to Geneva and fly to Málaga because I was racing in the Vuelta – the Tour of Spain,’ says Caritoux. But Caritoux was bemused. ‘I thought we weren’t racing?’ he said to de Gribaldy.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ his boss told him brusquely. In fact, the race organisers had threatened de Gribaldy with a hefty fine if he and his Skil team, even without Kelly, didn’t show up.

  Caritoux’s last-minute dash to Spain came after the usually indefatigable Kelly, weary after a gruelling spring that had included wins in Paris–Nice, Paris–Roubaix and Liège–Bastogne–Liège, cited fatigue and withdrew. Having already shown what he was capable of by winning the Ventoux finish at Chalet Reynard in that March’s ‘Race to the Sun’, Caritoux might have expected more support. But ‘de Gri’, whose relationship with Kelly was intense, merely saw the Vuelta as an obligation to be fulfilled.

  Caritoux was worthy of more respect. He had become a renowned climber. When it came to the Ventoux, he was acknowledged among French riders in the peloton as peerless, particularly after an amateur career in which he had always shone when racing over the Giant.

  The fifth day of the 1984 Paris–Nice was a split-stage day, something almost unheard of in modern stage racing. A short and intense morning stage, from Orange in the Rhône valley climbing to a finish at Chalet Reynard, was followed by an afternoon stage from Sault to Miramas, in the Bouches-du-Rhône. Only 64 kilometres long, the morning stage to Chalet Reynard drew the Caritoux fan club to the snow-covered verges of the Ventoux’s lower slopes, expecting springtime fireworks. Their local hero didn’t disappoint.

  Almost within sight of his home in Flassan, the 23-year-old forced the pace through the forest on the steepest ramps above St Estève, pulling away with Kelly, Robert Millar, Hinault, Fignon, Phil Anderson, Steven Rooks and Stephen Roche on his back wheel. When, in the closing moments, he realised that team leader Kelly’s overall position was secure, Caritoux took his chance, clawing back Millar’s lone attack and outsprinting the Scot to claim the stage.

  In a ‘Course au Soleil’ controlled by Kelly, but best remembered for Hinault’s swinging right hook to a protesting naval-yard worker’s grizzled jaw on the stage to La Seyne, Caritoux had proved his worth on the Ventoux’s most fearsome section – from St Estève to Chalet Reynard. Despite that, he was still seen as a poor substitute for Kelly by both de Gribaldy and the Vuelta organisers. But the last thing cash-strapped de Gribaldy wanted was to be penalised by one of the organisers of the three Grand Tours. So Caritoux became de facto leader.

  ‘He was on his uppers,’ Caritoux recalls of ‘de Gri’. ‘So he had to get us to the start. And he didn’t even show up – it was his assistant, Christian Rumeau, who was sports director.

  ‘They told us: “The result’s not important.” We just had to be there.’

  With that motivational masterclass ringing in their ears, it’s no wonder perhaps that Skil lost four riders almost as soon as the Vuelta began. But Caritoux, the unsung climber from the foot of the Ventoux, chose to bide his time. ‘Pedro Delgado came into form in the second week,’ he says, of the Spanish climber, ‘and I followed him all the time.’

  The seventh stage of the 1984 Vuelta included four climbs and climaxed on the Alto de Rasos de Peguera. It was there that Caritoux played his hand, attacking against expectations, to win the stage as Delgado took the race lead. Yet still Caritoux remained under the radar. Stage 12 climbed to the Lagos de Covadonga summit finish. Race favourite Alberto Fernández, now expected by Spain to make his move, went on the attack, working hard in an effort to drop both Delgado and Caritoux.

  But the boy from Flassan counterattacked with Reimund Dietzen to take more time in the final moments of the stage. It was enough to put Caritoux in the race lead, ahead of Fernández and a faltering Delgado. After that, things got nasty. Caritoux’s race leadership, at the expense of two Spanish favourites, bred resentment. With a top-three finish in the 1983 Vuelta and Giro d’Italia already under his belt, Fernández was relying on overhauling Caritoux in the remaining kilometres of time-trialling.

  But the Spaniard was wrong to be so complacent. ‘He thought he’d be able to get rid of me easily in the time trials, so he’d got his team to neutralise the racing. But that suited me – by that time I had hardly any team-mates left to help me,’ recalls Caritoux.

  The Frenchman, in those pre-Google days, made the most of being an unknown quantity. His form in time trials remained unheralded, at least in Spain. ‘When the Spanish journalists asked me what I was like in time trials, I told them I was pretty rubbish and that I had no chance.’ Caritoux’s bluff was swallowed whole. When it came to the first ‘race of truth’, on stage 14, he kept the overall lead.

  Again there were consequences. During the time trial, Caritoux was punched and shoved by spectators and then pelted with rotten fruit. Some even tried to shove umbrellas into his front wheel. At the finish, he needed a police escort to and from the presentation podium. Even then he refused to be intimidated. ‘I was 23 – I didn’t have any real sense of how dangerous it was,’ he says.

  When the threats failed, other tactics were wheeled out. In the final days of that year’s Vuelta, Caritoux says that his team was offered 100,000 francs to throw the race. ‘The Vuelta champion in those days won just 40,000 francs,’ he says. ‘We got together and decided, as a team, to turn it down. I thought that winning the Vuelta was priceless.’

  Delgado hadn’t become as defeatist as Fernández, though, and attacked in the final real mountain stage, to Segovia, launching a last-ditch attempt to overhaul Caritoux’s overall lead. Controversially, Italian star Francesco Moser joined the chase with Caritoux, helping to reel in the attack, and the Frenchman’s lead remained intact.

  He started the Vuelta’s final 33-kilometre time trial with a 37-second lead over Fernández. Caritoux kept his nerve and held on to win overall, by a mere six seconds after 3,593 k
ilometres of racing. It remains the slimmest winning margin in Grand Tour history.

  Back home, Caritoux’s victory was greeted with muted celebrations. He remained in the shadow of both Fignon – who took his second Tour de France later that year as Caritoux, riding for Kelly’s interests, finished 14th – and Hinault, at that time a curmudgeonly sleeping giant. Despite his Vuelta win, Caritoux was not hailed as a star.

  Nor was he as media-friendly as either of his better-known compatriots, who, it has to be said, loved the attention. Caritoux was a man out of time. His bashful peasant demeanour, his thick accent, his love of his vines, didn’t play well with metropolitan France in the mid-1980s. Instead, it was Fignon, the urbane Parisian, twice beaten on the Ventoux by Caritoux, who was the man to watch. He came within a hair’s breadth of winning the 1984 Giro, but through a combination of gamesmanship and bias – which included a TV helicopter hovering ahead of him in the final time trial – lost out to the same Moser who had lent Caritoux a helping hand in Spain.

  Hinault, meanwhile, was desperate to be top dog in France again and had yet to learn to bite his tongue. ‘I race to win, not to please people,’ he said, unaware that the occasional show of panache, which came in his final Tour in 1986, would endear him to the public just as much as a major win.

  The mid-1980s remains the last dominant period of French cycling, exemplified by the bitter rivalry between Hinault and Fignon and the rise of protégés such as Jeff Bernard, whose career was defined one afternoon on Mont Ventoux.

  Caritoux played his part in that tradition, even if he was largely overlooked. It’s still a little tragic that so few remember Éric Caritoux, the peasant lad called to the phone from the vineyards of the Ventoux by his gran, a champion by accident, just to save his boss’s face.

  Near the end of Éric Caritoux’s career, there was – predictably – an amphetamine-related doping scandal, dating back to his time track racing, after a police raid at the Six Day race in Paris-Bercy in 1986. Yet according to Willy Voet, later to become soigneur to the infamous Festina team led by Virenque, when Caritoux – who looked after Voet’s children following the Belgian’s arrest during the Festina Affair in July 1998 – won the Vuelta in 1984, he was not ‘using anything’.

  In modern cycling, mention of natural talent is often greeted with a roll of the eyes, but if any rider can properly claim that his ability was shaped by his environment, it’s Caritoux, born and raised on the slopes of the Giant. Even so, his Vuelta win was almost considered a fluke. Yet he was sixth overall the following year, and went on to ride 12 Tours de France during his career.

  Now he is back at the foot of the Ventoux, looking after his vines and orchards and running holiday homes hidden away on the slopes south of Flassan. Helped by his brother, Jean-Claude, he took on his family’s land as soon as he retired, in 1994. Now the emphasis is on table grapes and cherries. ‘Our wine grapes lost 50 per cent of their value in ten years,’ he says. ‘It was better to adapt.’

  The Caritoux cycling tradition has continued. Éric’s daughter, Kim, already a cycling prodigy before her teens, raced for the local Christophe Vélo Club in Montfavet, named after former Tour legend, Eugène Christophe. By the time she was 14, Kim was good enough to ride in the French National Championships, but given her father’s pedigree, and that of her mother Nathalie, also an accomplished rider, that was hardly a surprise.

  Meanwhile, Kim’s father still rides his bike, still climbs the mountain that he first rode up as an 11-year-old. The Ventoux is still ‘his’ mountain, still a climb apart. His analysis of the Ventoux’s enduring appeal is pragmatic. ‘Compared to other climbs,’ he says, ‘you have 15 or 16 kilometres of climbing, without any let-up. Apart from Chalet Reynard, where there are 300 metres of flat road, it climbs all the way from St Estève.

  ‘Depending on how fit you are, you put it in a 21, or 23, and don’t really change gear until you get to the top. On many other climbs, you get a couple of kilometres of flat road, or some false flat, or even a little descending. On the Ventoux there’s no chance to recover.’

  Perhaps unsurprisingly for a native of Flassan, Caritoux rates the southern ascent ahead of the north side.

  ‘Coming up from Bédoin is harder. But there’s not much between them – it’s almost as bad from Malaucène. You start at 300 metres above sea level and, in 21 kilometres, you climb to 1,909 metres altitude.

  ‘From Malaucène, there are some harder sections and others where you can really move up through the gears. But there’s nowhere to recuperate on the south side, and that’s the big difference.’

  And the road up from Sault? Caritoux is dismissive. ‘That’s on the big ring, at least up to Chalet Reynard. But coming up from Sault? That’s just so you can say: “I climbed the Ventoux.” ’

  By the mid 1990s, the language of the Tour de France had become as theatrically overblown and grandiose as its ethical malaise had become ingrained. Unnerved by the lack of champions, French media coverage inflated histrionically the vain hopes of Virenque, Laurent Jalabert, Luc Leblanc, Christophe Moreau and many others.

  There was little public talk of doping, at least not in print. There may have been no certainty of who was using what, but there was plenty of speculation. Yet winning performances were mythologised, and riders were glibly described as heroes or legends, not just in the French press, which had a tendency to romanticisation – a particular citation here for Virenque’s tear ducts – but elsewhere too.

  The period was characterised by some of the most tedious Tours, when the robotic and dead-eyed Miguel Indurain time-trialled his rivals into the ground. These races were almost wholly devoid of suspense. It speaks volumes that, ten years after LeMond had become the first English-speaking winner, it was a bald Dane, Bjarne Riis, previously best known as one of Fignon’s domestiques and using EPO as freely as Coppi used amphetamines, who ended the Indurain years.

  There was a Ventoux stage in the 1994 Tour, although the finish was not at the summit of the mountain, but in Carpentras. The winner was an Italian lead-out man, known for his abject climbing, whose imposing physique made him the least likely winner in a stage over the Giant.

  On a searing afternoon, Eros Poli, at six-foot-four the tallest man in the Tour peloton, rode alone across the Rhône valley until, eventually, as the villages of the Vaucluse fell away behind him, he turned left at St Estève and began climbing towards the summit of the Ventoux. The pain wracked the Italian’s chest and he closed his eyes in an effort to contain it. Poli was riding so slowly that he could hardly bear to look down at the computer on his handlebars. When he did, and saw his speed drop to single figures, he was gripped by a crippling panic. ‘I thought I was dying,’ he says now as he remembers the day that changed his career. ‘I’d never ridden so slowly before.’

  But this was not a funeral, this was a rebirth. Poli, lead-out man to sprinting superstar Mario Cipollini, and a mere passista, as he puts it, was reinventing himself. Against all odds, Eros won on the Ventoux proving romance wasn’t dead.

  Poli was the unlikeliest of mountain goats. Instead, all eyes were on his compatriot Marco Pantani, who had burst to prominence only a few weeks earlier, exploding the race in the mountains during the Giro d’Italia. Poli’s breakaway to the foot of the Ventoux was the latest in a series of attacking efforts that ultimately won him the Prix de la Combativité – the combativity prize – for that Tour.

  ‘It was between me and Pantani,’ he remembered. ‘I think I beat him by one point.

  ‘I was in a breakaway three times, first on the stage from Rennes to Futuroscope, about 18 minutes ahead at one point, and then with Thierry Marie, on the stage in the Pyrenees over the Peyresourde, Aspin, Tourmalet and to Luz Ardiden.’

  Perhaps, then, Poli attacking in the mountains wasn’t quite so unusual after all. Yet nobody would ever have expected that the break that would finally stick, right to the finish line, would be his solo ride over Mont Ventoux. As he admits, Poli was ‘very good’ at le
ading out star team-mate Mario Cipollini in the sprints, but he also acknowledges that he’d be the first one ‘crying in the mountains’.

  It was a good day for an Italian to pull off a surprise win. Only hours earlier Roberto Baggio had ballooned his penalty kick over the crossbar, costing Italy any lingering hopes of victory in the 1994 World Cup final. I was watching the match on a giant screen outside a bar in Montpellier’s Place de la Comédie. As Baggio’s penalty sailed into the sky, tables and chairs flew through the air, hurled in rage by a handful of holidaying Italians.

  The morning after that disappointment, Poli said that his largely Italian team was, understandably, down in the mouth. ‘Everyone was in a bad mood. It was too hot in our hotel and some guys had even taken to sleeping on the terrace. It was a brutal Tour that year.’

  Poli’s lone breakaway, over the summit of the Giant, to Carpentras was 170 kilometres long – a rare feat, particularly on such feared terrain. Would such an attack be possible in the modern era?

  ‘It’s hard to repeat that, but it’s possible when it’s very hot – and that day it was 42 degrees,’ he said. ‘In heat like that, the peloton doesn’t want to race fast. They prefer to take it easy for as long a time as possible. Maybe they made a mistake in their calculations, though, that day.’

  Yet this was still the most prestigious race in the world, and one of its most coveted mountain stages. Even so, Poli’s solo attack was almost a mistake. ‘It was a counterattack and I got the gap in a few seconds. They tried to catch me for about ten kilometres, but it was so hot that they needed to sit up and drink. And they let me go.’

  Once he’d broken clear, Poli, unworried by his isolation, settled into his effort and found his tempo. ‘I rode a 100-kilometre time trial,’ he laughs. ‘I didn’t wait for anybody; I didn’t need another rider. When it’s flat, I don’t need company.’